parenting and blender is a fundamental part of the rigging process.
But what is parenting?
Well parenting is when you form a
parent child relationship between two objects and a
parent child relationship is when a child object
inherits the transformation of a parent object.
However the child can still have its own local transformations.
In addition to the transformations inherited from the parent,
it's kind of like how kids have to follow their
parents when their parents moved from one city to another.
But once they're in the new city the kids can still walk to school on their own.
But why would we want to parent objects to another object?
Oftentimes parenting helps to more easily control the transformation and pivot
points of a group of objects for the sake of animation.
Some examples include parenting fingers to a hand,
parenting objects or papers to the surface of a desk or parenting leaves to a tree.
Allow me to demonstrate.
Let's take our cube for example and duplicate it with shift D
let's make this duplicate cube. Our parent object.
Just for visual clarity sake.
Let's scale this cube up a bit so that we know for sure it's the parent cube.
We can then select both cubes using shift left click
and then right click for a context menu.
Go down to parents and select object
for hot key users.
You can press control P after you have selected
your objects to access the same parenting menu.
Let's go ahead and start moving, rotating and scaling our larger cube.
And these smaller cubes should follow.
However it doesn't uh looks like we parented the wrong
cube and accidentally made the smaller cube the parent cube.
Since this isn't what we want. Let's undo that with control Z.
Now why did this happen?
Well it's very important to make sure you select your intended parent object last.
This will highlight the object in a slightly brighter yellow outline
indicating that it is the active object.
Once we've ensured that are active object is the one we want to parent our objects to.
We can repeat the parent action again
right click go to parenting
and select object.
Now we can move,
rotate and scale our parent cube and as you
can see our child cube is following right along.
An important note with parenting is that the pivot point of
the child object is completely ignored when inheriting parent transformation.
This includes instances where you select both the child and parent objects.
However,
transforming the child object still uses the child's local object origin.
In fact the child can still move around normally while parented.
It will simply be influenced by the parents transformations. In addition to its own
a parent object can have multiple Children objects
but child objects can only have one parent
for example.
We can add a new cube to the scene by going to the ad menu,
going to mesh and selecting cube.
This new cube does not currently have a parent
but we could parent it to the same large cube are other cuba's parented to.
This will give our larger cube to child cubes.
Fun fact if you want three child cubes you can actually duplicate one
of these cubes and I'll still be parented to the same large cube.
However what if we introduce another parent cube?
Let's say we duplicate the larger cube. So now we have to
I'm going to name this cube daddy cube one and this cube daddy cube to.
If we select our child cubes and then parent them to daddy cube to.
You'll notice that all relationship ties to daddy cube one have been cut
Transforming Daddy Cube one no longer affects the child cubes.
Meanwhile Daddy Cube to now affects the
transformations of the child cubes instead.
As you can see each object can only have
one parent but parents can have multiple Children.
Additionally we can also have a chain of parents.
If we select daddy cube to and then select daddy cube one.
We can actually make daddy cube one, the parent of daddy cube too.
This will also make Daddy Cube one, the grandparents in a way
of our three child cubes.
This chain of parents can go on for as long as you like
but it can't form a loop.
In other words if you try to parent daddy cube
one to any of its own Children or grandchildren cubes blender
will prevent you from doing so as that will form a
cyclic dependency which is kind of like dividing by zero.
This is the basic idea behind parenting but it's
important to know that it doesn't apply to only objects
parenting works for bones and empties as well.
Bones are what armature objects are made of also known as rigs or skeletons.
We'll go more into detail about bones in another video
but you can also parent things to empties.
These are objects that contain little to no
data except their own basic transformation data.
They're invisible at render and are typically
used for purposes of organization or reference.
You can find them in the AD menu and can parent them
in exactly the same way we did before with our cubes.
Parenting objects to empties is a common practice as you'll be able to transform and
deform multiple objects at once very easily if
they're all parented to the same empty.
My favorite example of this is when working
with environments that contain multiple objects and props
by parenting all of the environment objects to an empty.
You can transform the entire set very easily with one movement
as an added bonus the empty itself does not appear at render time.
This makes it even easier to manually control where the pivot
point for your group of objects will be for transformation.
Now real quick you may be wondering how do we unparalled an object?
Well that's simple,
simply select the object or objects you would like to
um parent and right click for a context menu.
Then go to parent
clear parent.
For hot key users you can press all T. P.
To bring up the un parenting menu.
You might also be curious about what the clear and keep transformation option is for
this is used for cases where the object you're trying to unpack.
Arent has already inherited transformation from its parent for a while
and you want to keep that transformation.
But removing the parent child relationship
actually removes that transformation entirely.
So instead you want to choose Clear and
keep transformation under the un parenting menu.
As you can see despite being parented,
the object has not moved from its previous location, rotation and scale.
If you simply choose clear parent,
it will clear all inherited transformation from the parent
and return it to where it would have been
if it was never parented at all.